Conference Confronts the Difficulties of Being Muslim and Gay

Saying they came together out of loneliness and faith, a small group of men and women who are both gay and Muslim gathered yesterday in Manhattan to explore the tricky question of how to reconcile their sexual orientation with their religion.

It is a question that gay men and women of other faiths have grappled with before them. But Muslims in the United States, the organizers of the conference said, must confront even more dramatic rejection by family and culture for their homosexuality.

''The issues facing gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Muslims are much more extreme than anyone realizes,'' said a 21-year-old Pakistani-born man named Faisal, who asked that his last name not be published. ''You are dealing with a population in the West that is a double minority -- gay and Muslim. They are dealing with pressures of marriage that are beyond imaginable, where parents live to see their kids marry, and with a culture that is very strict in its gender roles.''

The conference, the first of its kind in the United States, drew about 60 people from across the country and Canada and as far away as England. It was sponsored by the Al-Fatiha Foundation, which was formed four months ago in New York City. Most of those at the conference, including some who registered under false names, asked that their last names not be published out of fear for their safety or of embarrassing their families.

''We offer a safe space to gay Muslims to interact with other gay Muslims and raise questions about Islam,'' said a man named Husayn, who described himself as a recent convert to the religion. ''There is an incredible amount of loneliness and suffering.''

In big American cities, there are already gay organizations, like groups for Arabs and Southeast Asians, that include Muslims but identify themselves along secular ethnic lines.

Leaders of Al-Fatiha, which means ''the opening'' in Arabic, said they formed the group to create a community for homosexuals based on a shared religion, much as gay Jews and Christians have created their own groups. ''In many instances, religion is the source of inner conflict, as well as family and cultural conflict,'' said Faisal, who founded the group and splits his time between Washington and New York. ''Our mission is to help individuals reconcile their homosexuality with their religion, in whatever way they want to do it.''

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That goal is achievable, said several at the conference at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in the West Village.

''I think they can be reconciled, simply because they have been reconciled in individual people's lives already,'' said the keynote speaker, Ghazala Anwar, a scholar of Islam who has taught at Colgate University.

Islam, like many other major religions, condemns homosexual acts and in many Islamic countries, homosexuality and committing homosexual acts are crimes. In a few countries, among them Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, they are punishable by death. Homosexuality remains a taboo in Muslim communities all over the world, including the United States. Several Al-Fatiha members said they have failed to find any imams, or prayer leaders, willing to speak openly with the group.

Faisal said his family moved to rural Connecticut when he was 11, and he developed a strong attachment to and identification with Islam, in part because he was the only Muslim at his school. When he revealed his homosexuality at college in Boston, Faisal said he was asked to leave several Muslim youth groups. His parents found out when someone copied some of his Internet messages to a gay chat line and distributed them at the family's mosque. Their shock was voiced in both personal and religious terms. ''My mom first said, 'You can't call yourself a Muslim anymore,' '' Faisal recalled.

The people at the conference said they have no illusions about changing attitudes toward homosexuality in much of the Islamic world. ''In the West, it's easier to question orthodox interpretations of Islam, so if there is a place where gay Muslims are going to be accepted -- and we're speaking of gay identity, not of the sexual act -- it will be in the West,'' said Raza Griffiths, a writer from Nottingham, England.

Al-Fatiha members said they do not intend to start their own mosque -- at least not for many years. ''Islam is about community, and if we open a gay mosque, it would isolate us even more from our community,'' Faisal said. ''But we want to make it so that somebody can go to a mainstream mosque and hear the rhetoric and still feel O.K. about himself.''